After good start, PECO has close eye' on storm

Staff Photo by Vinny Tennis
Rich Breitenstein shovels his driveway along Hopewell Road in East Brandywine on Thursday, Feb. 13, 2014. A nor'easter dropped more than a foot of snow across the county, some areas reporting up to 16".

The region was still getting over last week’s ice storm – in which 80 percent of Chester County electric customers lost power – when a nor’easter hammered the region on Thursday, bringing over a foot of snow to most areas.

According to PECO, the number of residents who lost power during Thursday’s snow storm varied throughout the day, but did not come close to reaching the sky-high numbers of the ice storm last Tuesday.

“It’s a major difference from last week,” said PECO spokesman Greg Smore.

Smore said that while Thursday’s storm brought a lot of snow to the region, the lack of ice meant fewer trees and power lines falling. As of 1 p.m., Smore said PECO had around 5,000 reported outages in their coverage area, much less than last week’s high of 715,000.

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The snow began to hammer the region late Wednesday night, and while it caused a few thousand outages in the county Thursday morning, PECO said an increase in staff had meant the company was restoring power as quickly as it could.

Smore said that after last week’s ice storm, PECO had decided to keep its Emergency Service Center open, allowing for increased staffing. Smore said that more restoration crews and dispatchers meant crews were sent out immediately after outages were reported Thursday. Additionally, Smore said that PECO had retained as many of the out-of-state crews “as possible” for help with this storm.

Smore said that around 4,200 PECO employees and out-of-state contractors were working Thursday to restore power.

The numbers of those without power rose and fell throughout the day Thursday. At around 8 a.m., about 5,000 customers were reporting outages. However, that number fell dramatically in two hours with only 69 customers reporting outages around 10 a.m. Smore also noted that while some of the outages were caused by the weather, others may have been “every day occurrences” that would cause issues.

As the snow picked up throughout the region PECO continued to report more people without power. At 11 a.m., 913 customers were without power in Chester County, but within a half hour, that dropped back down to just over 300.

The numbers of those without electricity continued to jump all day Thursday, but did not reach the mass numbers of last week. Throughout the day, the majority of the power outages took place in Parkesburg, Downingtown, Coatesville and Willistown.

Smore said the reason that the numbers kept increasing and decreasing rapidly was because crews were getting out to areas that needed power restoration right away and fixing the problem.